Those We Love Most (7 page)

Insomnia was taking its toll, making it difficult for her to focus on simple tasks, let alone think about the future. Lying in bed, Maura would will her mind to fill with imagined scenes of tranquility, empty stretches of beach in California, remote mountains in the Pacific Northwest, waterfalls in Hawaii, vistas both familiar and unvisited. She would force her mind to take refuge in those places. And then when the visual imagery exercises didn’t work, exhausted by grief, Maura would pop a sleeping pill, which brought sweet and almost instant relief, a chloroformed curtain that silenced her mind and snuffed out all dreams. She worried that she was becoming reliant on them to sleep at all. Addicted. She’d begun to wake up at 3:00
A.M.
and would often take another half pill just to drift back off.

Last night, Ryan had come into their bed in the middle of the night and she’d woken, groggy from the sleeping pills. She could hear the TV blaring downstairs and assumed Pete had fallen asleep on the couch. It was increasingly becoming a habit.

“I’m scared, Mommy,” Ryan had said. And she could feel the slimness of him, his insubstantiality as he crawled next to her under the covers. His knobby boy knees and limbs were like a colt’s on the verge of a growth spurt.

“What’s scary, Ry?” she’d asked.

“That I’m gonna die. I don’t want to die. I don’t want you and Dad to die.”

She’d become more alert, swimming up hard through the medication to tackle his fears. “You’re not going to die, honey,” she’d told him. “You are going to live for a long time and be very, very, old. Ancient. So am I. I’m going to be a good grandmother for your kids, and I’m going to get old and very, very gray and love you forever,” and she had tickled him just above his belly button, and they both had giggled. They had lain like that for a few minutes, snuggling, and then Ryan had curled into her chest and let out a long, satisfied breath. As their bodies emanated warmth she focused on the memory of being pregnant, of carrying him for all those months.

She had thought him asleep, but then he piped up again, surprising her with his alertness. “I miss him, Mommy,” he said. “I miss James.”

This simple declaration had sideswiped her. She’d been focusing so much on cultivating a sense of normalcy in the house, stepping around the issue, that she had not spent enough time, she realized, probing the loss from her children’s perspective.

“I miss him too, Ryan,” she said, dry-eyed. And again she fought against the power of the medication as it tugged her back toward a dreamless sleep. “And it’s OK to miss him. It’s OK for us all to miss him forever. It hurts a lot.” It must have been this admission that had freed Ryan to nod off in her arms. The next morning she couldn’t recall when Pete had eventually come up and lifted their son back into his own bed. Such was the power of those pills.

Which was why today, Maura was determined to have a family meal. She had spent the last hour making a salad with her homemade dressing and creating a stir-fry of chicken and vegetables that her kids loved. It was 6:00
P.M.
Pete should be home any minute. “Dinner,” she called, lifting Sarah into the high chair. “Wash your hands, Ryan.” Maura shook out the dry dog food for Rascal and lowered his metal bowl back onto the floor. “Sarah, here’s your milk.” Her daughter grabbed her sippy cup solemnly, turning it to study the cartoon image of the Little Mermaid on the exterior.

She finished cutting chicken bits for Sarah and spooning out white rice for Ryan as the phone rang. Maura could see from the caller ID that it was Pete.

“Hey,” he said. There was the murmur of bar chatter in the background. The Depot, she thought, his favorite place to gather for a “pop.” She’d been there a few times over the years, a darkened man cave next to the train station with the smell of tapped kegs and a sticky film on the highly varnished bar. Two giant TVs, held by chains, tilted from the ceiling at each end of the room, perpetually tuned to ESPN.

“Hey.” They were quiet for a moment, and she could hear a loud baritone laugh spike over the conversation. How could he possibly sit in a bar, just four weeks after their son’s funeral? She marveled for more than the hundredth time how differently men and women grieved.

“Billy just showed up and he’s had a bad day. I think I’m gonna stick around here for a while longer,” he said. Was he slurring slightly? How long had he been there? She had told him when he left that morning she wanted to have a family dinner, that they needed to reestablish some kind of normal routine for their kids.

“So I figured.” Her voice was cool.

“Save me a plate, will ya? I’m just having one more pop with the guys. Just one. I’ll be there. Billy just broke up with his latest. Or I guess she sort of blew him off. Remember her? Marjorie?”

“Uh-huh.”

“He’s been there for us through this thing, you know, Maura? For our family. I just want to support him. OK? Home in an hour.” He practically hung up before she could reply.

On some level, Maura understood that this male camaraderie was Pete’s therapy, his attempt to make sense of such a devastating loss. She wondered if Pete and his friends actually discussed James at all, if they ever even spoke about the accident directly or uttered his name. Either way, she knew it undoubtedly comforted Pete to sit, in communion with a beer, next to his longtime friends Michael, Chris, Thomas, or Billy. She could imagine her husband tamping down his grief, perhaps letting it defuse little by little as he listened to comments about a score or a play, cheered his beloved White Sox, and motioned to the bartender for another round for his pals. Those men had loved James too, she knew.

And yet as she sat down to eat with Sarah and Ryan, making an excuse for Pete, she couldn’t help nursing the old grudge. Pete was cheating her and the kids with his absences. She had hoped that at the very least James’s death might cinch them tighter as a family, draw them closer. If anything, Pete needed to redouble his efforts as a father instead of burying his head in a beer with the boys. How would they begin to rebuild their broken family if he didn’t show up?

After reading to Sarah, she entered Ryan’s room to kiss him good night. Lowering the shade, she looked out the window, half-hoping to see Pete’s headlights sweeping the lawn as they turned up the driveway. Maura was transfixed for a moment by the base of the giant maple tree in the center of the front lawn. The long fingers of yellow light spilling out from the front room windows and onto the grass touched the skirt of the trunk on one side; the other half was shrouded in inky darkness. James had loved to climb that tree, and he’d tried to convince Pete to build a fort there.

“Forts are for backyards, buddy,” Pete would routinely answer. “And we don’t have a really good tree back there.” How much of that was true? Maura wondered ruefully, and how much of it was laziness on Pete’s part? Maura’s eyes scanned the lawn again from Ryan’s window, and she gazed out onto the street where the lamplight pooled in a neat elliptical shape. The soft whir of the air-conditioning kicked on, and the blast from the vent furled the curtain slightly.

There it was again. Out of the corner of her eyes. A movement, almost as if a figure were down there. Was someone under the tree? Suddenly she wished Pete were home. It was Friday night in the dead of summer. Maybe the neighborhood kids were getting into some mischief now that school had been out for a while. The thought made her uneasy, and Maura leaned over and kissed Ryan one last time as she pulled her thin bathrobe around her, repositioning and tightening the belt. She padded swiftly down the stairs and into the family room at the front of the house, moving over to the plate glass window and adjusting the curtain on the side. It was unmistakable now, the faint outline of someone lying under the maple. A tiny speck of orange glowed and then moved in an arc. Someone was smoking a cigarette on her front yard.

The unexpectedness, the pluck of it, banished her fear for a moment. Maura yanked open the heavier oak door and felt a rush of humid air
whoosh
through the screen door, as if the house had inhaled. The brightness of the interior lights made it difficult for her to distinguish shapes instantly, and as her pupils adjusted, she saw a blur of movement on the side of the tree. The figure had bolted upright and was running down the driveway and into the street with long, measured strides. It was definitely a boy, a teenager from the lankiness of his legs, and as the shape got smaller, disappearing and then reappearing at intervals under each streetlight, she thought she could make out longish dirty blond hair and a faded red T-shirt.

Maura was frozen for a moment on the front porch, her heart thumping wildly, and then gradually settling. It had all happened so fast that even as she closed and then locked the door behind her she was already beginning to doubt exactly what she’d seen.

One month after his death Maura felt the hollowed-out absence of James more acutely than she had during the funeral, or in the days immediately following, when she��d confined herself to her bedroom, shades drawn. Her mother was no longer coming daily, and Pete’s parents too had cut back on their check-ins, which was both a relief and a loss. This “after” part was almost worse, her grief sharper and more intense during the empty stretch of hours in the house while Ryan was at summer camp and Sarah napped. In those moments of acute silence, Maura would visit James’s room. She had created a ritual of lying on his bed, eyes closed, imagining him here.

She stood in the doorframe and took in the posters of her son’s sports and music heroes on the pale blue walls, the worn stuffed animal frog above his desk that had been retired when he’d become “a big boy.” Stepping over to the bookshelf, which she had sanded and painted with constellation stencils when he was four, Maura ran her fingertips across the books’ spines. She brushed a light layer of dust off the volume of Greek mythology he had cherished, the encyclopedia of dinosaurs, the Harry Potter series that she had first started reading to him and then, with each passing installment, he had begun to read more quickly himself. There were the baseball trophies, the yellow dried palm frond in the shape of a cross from this past Easter, and the porcelain piggy bank that had been a baby gift from Erin with
JAMES PATRICK CORRIGAN
painted on the belly and under it his height and weight. Seven pounds, four ounces. Maura blinked, dry-eyed. She lifted the bank, and the coins slid into the pig’s head. It was heavier than she’d expected. James had always been a saver.

Opening the closet door she drank in his boy scent on the baseball uniform and discarded pajamas from that very last morning. She had left his dirty clothes in the hamper so that she could retain this scent memory, and she felt him here, trace elements present in the objects of his room. But she could not yet fully admit that his smell was disappearing, being erased, the clothes in his drawers gradually assuming the generic scent of laundry detergent, mingled with the slight cedar odor of the round wooden air fresheners. With each passing week, little bits of James were slipping away and dissolving, thwarting her efforts at preservation.

There was always a point in her visitation of his room where the finality of his loss reared up and overwhelmed her. Life stopped at the edges of this room. Maura sat back down on the bed, holding her head as she let the sobs come, and then lay down, curling like a caterpillar on the thin SpongeBob bedspread.

Rascal, as if understanding her distress, moved over to nuzzle her ankles the way he did when he wanted a dog treat or to be lifted onto a lap. He yelped as she hoisted him up to James’s bed, absentmindedly forgetting to support his back with both hands. Rascal settled in the C-curve of her curled body and let out a sigh as Maura began to stroke his silky ears. The dog missed James too.

It had been James who had first noticed when Rascal seemed to struggle on the stairs last winter. Maura had guessed it might be something with his hips, or maybe his back. If only she’d known where that would lead, how something as innocuous as a visit to the veterinarian could be a catalyst for the fulcrum event in her life.

As the dog’s mobility had steadily shrunk, Rascal began to drag his back foot slightly, and she’d called for an appointment. It was probably nothing, she’d told her son, old age. Dachshunds were notorious for back and disc problems, and he was at least eight years old.

Rascal had been James’s more than any of theirs. He had begged for a dog practically since he could speak, and it had become part of the bedtime ritual. He began to step up his requests to include other times of the day, if they passed someone walking a dog or saw a movie where a dog was featured. It became clear to her that at some point having a dog was essential to her eldest son’s childhood, like jumping in piles of raked leaves, playing flashlight tag, or learning how to ride a two-wheeler.

Pete had ultimately joined the chorus, arguing with her that they should do this for the kids. “Every kid deserves to have a dog,” he’d said to her. “It’s not like I won’t be around to help too.” But in her mind there had been no question it would be she who ended up with the dirty work, she who would be walking in the early hours with one of those little blue plastic bags in her hand as her dog crouched to poop with an embarrassed hunch. There were times when she’d felt her resolve slipping, and she would conjure up just this image to stick to her convictions.

But a part of her had always understood that all of this was just a slow process of erosion. Adding a dog to the family would simply be a matter of time. Once she was pregnant with Sarah, she and Pete had already determined that she would stay home with the kids full-time. She’d quit her job at the hotel’s corporate offices and ceased commuting into Chicago. As she gradually adjusted to a new rhythm of life as a stay-at-home mom, she’d finally relented.